Articulations of populism: the Nordic case

ABSTRACT

Populism as a concept is elusive and has been connected to very different political movements. Generally, populism’s connotations are rather negative and the term is often used pejoratively in the academic field as well. However, Ernesto Laclau has approached populism by arguing that populist reason is a manifestation of political logic in which group identification – formed through various signifiers such as ‘the people’, which are articulated as part of an ‘equivalence chain’ – eventually establishes political agency as a totality. This paper uses Laclau’s articulation theory to analyse the public construction of contemporary populism in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The analysis demonstrates that mainstream media frame populism rather negatively, although examples of the term’s positive identification with ‘the people’ are available, especially in the tabloid media. Thus, the positive identification behind the forming of populist movements clashes with the media discourse that prioritizes established journalistic views, practices and sources, making populism a ‘floating signifier’, that is, a concept that has several meanings which are contested in various public discourses. A general pattern in the construction of populism in Northern European multi-party democracies can be discerned, thus identifying the central role of nationalist and nativist identifications in contingent populist articulations. However, the differences between the Nordic countries emphasize a context-driven approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• Laclau
• articulation theory
• Nordic countries
• floating signifier
• radical contextualism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Juha Herkman is an Academy Research Fellow in the Department of Social Research at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His current research project explores the relationship between populism and the media in the Nordic countries. Formerly Herkman has worked as a full-time lecturer of media studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. His research interests have focused on popular culture, political economy of the media and political communication. Herkman has published several academic textbooks in Finnish, and articles in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, Javnost - the Public, Nordicom Review, and Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies and Journalism Studies.

Notes

1. Obviously, Laclau refers here to the Althusserian theory of ideology without making any explicit reference (Althusser 1971).

2. The populist New Democracy movement broke through to the Swedish parliament in the early 1990s, but it declined after one term.

3. The Danish People’s Party and the conservative bloc lost the 2011 elections to a left-wing alliance, reducing media attention on the domestic populist party in Denmark. However, the party was very successful in the next general elections of 2015, and it is probable that media attention was higher for that event.

4. Laclau and the Essex School serve as inspiration here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under Grant 259393 (Research Council for Culture and Society).